Lyubov Barabashova became the laureate of the Pyotr Weil scholarship

Lyubov Barabashova, a freelance correspondent of Radio Svoboda on Sakhalin, became the laureate of the annual scholarship named after Peter Weil “Free Russian Journalism”.

Barabashova graduated from the Faculty of History and Sociology of Sakhalin State University. He has been working with Radio Svoboda since 2016 and the Sibir.Realii project since 2017. The author of dozens of materials about everyday life, political and social problems on Sakhalin.

At the end of last year, the Russian authorities recognized Barabashova as a “foreign agent”. The journalist considered such a decision unfair to many representatives of the Russian press.

The Petr Weil Scholarship “Free Russian Journalism” was established in 2009 in memory of the famous writer and longtime employee of the Russian Service on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his birth. The winner of the scholarship is the best, according to the editors, freelance correspondent of Radio Liberty.

• Petr Weil (1949-2009) – a famous Russian novelist, publicist, essayist, radio journalist – spent more than 20 years at the microphone of Radio Liberty, first as a freelancer, and since 1989 as a permanent employee of the New York Bureau of Radio Liberty. In 1992, he headed the bureau in New York, since 1995 – an employee of the Prague editorial office of the Russian Service, assistant director of the Russian Service for Information Broadcasting. In the last years of his life, he held the post of editor-in-chief of the Russian Service.
• The Russian service of Radio Liberty – a part of the media corporation Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RSE/RS) – began its work in 1953. The office in Moscow was opened in 1991 by the decision of the President of Russia Boris Yeltsin.
• Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty announced the termination of the bureau in Russia on March 6, 2022. Two days before that, the Federal Tax Service appealed to the Moscow Arbitration Court with a demand for compulsory bankruptcy of RSE/RS LLC, which represents the interests of the media corporation in Russia. These actions, as the management of the media corporation stated at the time, represented the culmination of a multi-year campaign to obstruct the work of Radio Liberty and other Russian-language RCE/RS projects.
• The technical reason for the bankruptcy of “RSE/RS” LLC was the media corporation’s decision not to pay the fines imposed by the Russian authorities for refusing to accompany every journalistic material with an indication that the media corporation was included in the list of “foreign agents”. The total amount of fines issued by Roskomnadzor since January 2021 has exceeded 15 million dollars. More than 30 journalists cooperating with RFE/RL have been included by the Ministry of Justice of Russia in the list of “foreign media agents”.
• The sites of Russian-language RCE/RS projects, including the sites of the Russian Service of Radio Liberty, were blocked by Roskomnadzor for refusing to remove information about the Russian military invasion of a neighboring country. Despite the blockade, 2022 turned out to be statistically the most successful year for “Svobody”: our sites registered more than 160 million visitors, “Svobody” video materials are hosted YouTube were viewed almost 2 billion times.
• In December 2022, the Russian service of Radio Liberty presented a new audio platform on a specialized video hosting channel YouTube Radio Svoboda Live.